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Testing 65 Different GPUs On Linux With Open Source Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "How good are open source graphics drivers in 2014 given all the Linux gaming and desktop attention? Phoronix has tested 65 different GPUs using the latest open source drivers covering Intel HD Graphics, NVIDIA GeForce, AMD Radeon, and AMD FirePro hardware. Of the 65 GPUs tested, only 50 of them had good enough open source driver support for running OpenGL games and benchmarks. Across the NVIDIA and AMD hardware were several pages of caveats with different driver issues encountered on Linux 3.15 and Mesa 10.3 loaded on Ubuntu 14.04. Intel graphics on Linux were reliable but slow while AMD's open-source Linux support was recommended over the NVIDIA support that doesn't currently allow for suitable graphics card re-clocking. Similar tests are now being done with the proprietary Linux drivers."
As a notice before getting started, if you appreciate all of this extensive Linux hardware testing done exclusively at Phoronix, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. Premium subscribers are able to view the site ad-free, view multi-page articles on a single page, and it goes to support the site. At the very least, due to the vast amount of time I single-handedly invest into the site, please don't use AdBlock for Phoronix.com.
THIRTEEN page clicks and no Print option?
FUCK YOU.
Right now, there are practically no reasons to focus on video drivers and graphics acceleration for Linux. DVDs and GNOME 3 are barely enough to scratch the surface. Once games come in and improve the driver landscape, there are all sorts of things that will benefit from access to the video cards' power.
I recently updated my Mint install and discovered that the newer AMD/FGLRX drivers have a big issue with the backlight on various laptops (mainly, that they turn it off or down to zero).
At first I thought I had no display, but later noticed that if there is some front-light I could vaguely see the login window.
As it's an older model, it seems to get less attention from AMD (Nvidia is much the same). However, I was happy to see how much better the FOSS driver seems to work these days, so for now I'm back to using that. Backlight works, and video seems reasonably fast. I haven't tried any 3d/gaming yet but it will be interesting to see how that stacks up.
I have an old Radeon X1950PRO in guest/spare PC. While it's getting long in the tooth it's still good enough for some Star Craft 2 and Dota 2 action with friends. Unfortunately I have to boot to windows 7 to get decent performance. The kernel devs are always changing the driver interface, so the last time I was able to use the proprietary drivers was around Ubuntu 6. Now in Linux my only option are buggy, glitch drivers like Phoronix described in their drivers or booting to Windows. The hardware specs were released. Now if after 8 year, the open source drivers are still buggy and slow, they will never be as good as the proprietary. What Linux needs a stable driver interface like Windows has.
then proceed through 13 pages of eye cancer....kthnxbye
The problem is that games and benchmarking applications require only a single simple OpenGL context but the performance of composited Linux desktops is trash.
SOL
I just wanted to say that Phoronix is an undervalued gem. These guys (I think just one guy actually) puts in the grunt work to get us hard performance numbers. He's developed a fully automated testing system that makes it easy to bisect kernel patches to identify the source of kernel regressions. I get the impression he runs on a shoestring budget out of his house but the work he does is the kind of thing that OS vendors of old used to dedicate entire teams too. He really ought to be fully funded by some group like the Linux Foundation because his work is invaluable in that nitty-gritty unsexy way that really helps out more visible engineering.
Also, THIS year will be the year of the Linux desktop. Mark my words. THIS year is it.
The real trick for Linux compatibility is the ability to go to a box store, buy a new graphics card (or any device) Plug it in into your PC and see if it works, works without having to spend hours finding the driver for your common distribution, and works well.
That has been my biggest problem with Linux support.
It is a case where a particular component failed on my computer, and I need a new one right away. Being that your computer is down, you are unable to research what you should get. So you go to the store look around and find something that would seem to work with your computer. A name that you recognize, and specs that are probably better then your old one.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm happy if graphics work at all on a Linux box. I tried to install Fedora 20 on a box last week, and the installer would not work in any graphics mode (safe mode or otherwise) and I had to go back to Fedora 19. I had a box with a name-brand video card, and keeping the drivers working was a hideous process being dumped to a console every time I updated the kernel and having to update the drivers, and the desktop environment crashed all the time. The only stable, working graphics I have ever had with Linux are Intel's built-in motherboard graphics. I don't know about the performance, but at least it doesn't crash constantly. Linux just plain sucks rotten eggs on the desktop. I'm a die-hard user and I hate it. I don't see how a normal human being could ever deal with it.
As far as I know the only way to get good gaming performance on Linux is by using the proprietary drivers on a NVidia card.
Has anything changed lately?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Quickly followed by the second coming of Christ.
I bought a 6870 as an upgrade to my Mac Pro, mainly because it was highly compatible with OS X (it only fails to show the grey apple screen during boot) and is far cheaper than officially-supported cards. It's also a good mid-tier card on Windows.
And according to this, the 6870 is also basically the best card for use under Linux using open-source drivers, so I guess it's just a very good card in general. When I do a new from-scratch build, I might put Linux on the old Mac so I can play around with Linux gaming more.
77% seems like some fairly good numbers... sure 80-90% would be better, but you can't win them all.
skipped the next 16 pages as I don't care about what you need to do to get 15 different graphics cards to work on ubuntu....
really I'd only care about what it would take to a graphics card that I owned working on linux....
Nouveau project is a secret plot to make Intel graphics look good by comparison.
It's the best game ever. The GPU can handle it -- believe me.
Their interface is stable per version of Windows. They freeze the ABI and it is set until the next one. They don't change it much usually anyhow, Vista being a notable exception. Now of course when new DX features come out you have to update your drivers to support it if you want those features, but it isn't necessary to make your driver work, the old driver continues to work.
It does not get updated with every kernel patch, ala Linux.
Unless you like to see ads and terrible writing by Michael Larabel
It's going to be 65 flavours of bad!
Since we're on this subject and I'm too damned lazy to research, I'd welcome any suggestions for cards that play nicely with 4k monitors, preferably at 60Hz, on Ubuntu derivatives, especially Mint.
[FUCK BETA]
While hacking open source drivers for many things is great, it seems like a huge waste of time when the proprietary drivers exist. The end user isn't really to concerned about where the driver comes from so long as it works.
Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die.
These people would do as well to stand on a soap box on a public street corner to engage in gifted oration, then hand out leaflets to the crowd suggesting that people express their support and appreciation by signing up for a no-cost-to-your-pocket-book alcohol tolerance study at the local university (to more precisely characterize the vomit threshold for the advancement of medical science) , for which the orator himself receives a small referral fee.
Advertising, much like alcohol, is hardly known as a tonic to clarity of mind. I'll pass, thank you very much. I've far in extreme of the Mormons on the issue of what passes into my brain through my eye sockets. Alcohol only makes me vulnerable to the lizard housed within (he's not so bad, really, once you stare him down). Advertising, on the other hand, exposes me to spitting cobra exotoxins. The dead giveaway is the spinning iris of seduction: animated GIFs, Flash-based logo rotations, pop-ups, pop-overs, all resembling nothing so much as a vulture with the twitching tail of a live and highly agitated squirrel shit to the ischium out of the vulture's ass.
Shall I welcome this bubonic creature to peck at my eyeballs from the side of my screen? Even for "Four score and twenty" or "I have a dream"?
Nah. I don't think so. Not unless I've got a bag full of Shuriken ice picks and it's somebody else's HD monitor.
Just pass the test the same way you could in 2000 and download the NVIDIA or AMD driver from their websites. If you want a dead simple answer without artificial restrictions that's all you have to do - instead of whining about how your artificial restriction is making things hard.
In fact such a post makes you look so stupid that I strongly suspect you have an agenda to push and do not care if you look stupid to many so long as you manage to fool the naive. Is that what is going on here?
Just saying.
Yes.
You could conceivably say that of the 65 tested, "only" 15 did not have good enough OpenGL support. This...other...usage of the word "only"...I do not think it means what you appear to think it means...
By FAR & on multiple levels in efficiency, speed, security, + reliability:
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ 32/64-bit:
http://start64.com/index.php?o...
(Details of hosts' benefits enumerated in link)
Summary:
---
A. ) Hosts do more than AdBlock ("souled-out" 2 Google/Crippled by default) + Ghostery (Advertiser owned) - "Fox guards henhouse", or Request Policy -> http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
B. ) Hosts add reliability vs. downed or redirected DNS + secure vs. known malicious domains too -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... w/ less added "moving parts" complexity + room 4 breakdown,
C. ) Hosts files yield more speed (blocks ads & hardcodes fav sites - faster than remote DNS), security (vs. malicious domains serving mal-content + block spam/phish & trackers), reliability (vs. downed or Kaminsky redirect vulnerable DNS, 99% = unpatched vs. it & worst @ ISP level + weak vs FastFlux + DynDNS botnets), & anonymity (vs. dns request logs + DNSBL's).
---
Hosts do more w/ less (1 file) @ a faster level (ring 0) vs redundant browser addons (slowing up slower ring 3 browsers) via filtering 4 the IP stack (coded in C, loads w/ OS, & 1st net resolver queried w\ 45++ yrs.of optimization).
* Addons are more complex + slowup browsers & in message passing (use a few concurrently - you'll see)
** Addons slowdown SLOWER usermode browsers layering on MORE - & bloating memory consumption too + hugely excessive CPU usage (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth...)
SO - Instead, I work w/ what you have in kernelmode, via hosts (A tightly integrated PART of the IP stack itself)
APK
P.S.=> "The premise is, quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work FOR the body, rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen "I AM LEGEND"
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"What Linux needs a stable driver interface like Windows has."
You're KIDDING, right?
Linux developers actually add extra code to specifically make it hard to install and use non-opensource drivers; they're NEVER gonna make a stable interface that would enable any vendor to depend upon it and release drivers that violate the FOSS religion. If Linus developers actually cared about "freedom" and wanted to encourage anything other than "free" amateur video drivers, [1] they'd have a stable, documented driver interface for each major Kernel version, [2] have NOT ONE LINE OF CODE in the build to intentionally cripple proprietary drivers, [3] distributions would (at install time) allow the user the easy option of specifying a proprietary driver rather than quietly forcing a terribly dysfunctional but "religiously pure" Nouveau driver, and [4] distributions and Linux would fix their licenses to make it clearly legal for distros to (if they choose to) bundle proprietary drivers along with the "free" ones, without threatening the licenses of the proprietary ones.
I'm not just saying, I'm pointing out.
Interestingly Valve doesn't merly influence the market by their game being a reason.
They actually do directly help progress with actual code.
See reports on the same Phoronix website of various OpenGL 4.x extension being added to Mesa by Valve.
One day, when the Mesa finally achieves full opengl 4x compliance, you'll know it's partly due to developer on Valve's payroll (in addition to those on Intel's and AMD's payrolls, and the independent volunteers in Nouveau project, and the thousands of other contributors - some corporate other independent).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And that's AMD official stance:
- once the opensource drivers get good enough, support for older cards gets removed from catalyst, and radeon is pointed as the official go-to solution for older cards.
- so catalyst = drivers for the current generation of cards (unless you want to beta test the bleeding-edge development) and radeon = drivers for all the previous generation (unless you want specifically a card that still isn't phased out yet, probably because the current openCL support is better in catalyst).
- that's also part of the reason why AMD has opensource driver developers on their payroll.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And one day, once Mesa and DRI/Gallium etc. mature enough you'll probably going to have a similar landscape in Linux.
For now, it's "work in progress" zone.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
OP has a point. You're just trolling. I'm saying AND pointing out.
The interesting part, is that the guy is building a test-farm infrastructure.
The kernel benchmarking/bissecting stuff could be automated and could become part of the normal development project.
(Having the test farm continuously benchmark key linux project (llike kernel, mesa, etc.) while they are developed).
That is going to be:
- a very valuable ressource for linux development
- a service that can be sold or that can be sponsored by big player (Valve co-financing the mesa/gallium continuous benchmarking ?)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They're 1 of 5 types of people (bank on it):
1.) Advertisers
2.) malware makers
3.) botnet herders
4.) webmasters
5.) An INFERIOR competitor (e.g. - AdBlock, Ghostery, & RequestPolicy)
* Doesn't 'take a brain' to realize THAT much - after all: THEY'RE THE ONES WHO GET "HURT" by it... problem is, per my other post to you? THEY have been hurting others bandwidth/speed, security, & more for DECADES...
Funniest part is that those technically unjustifiable downmods are "the best they got" but they certainly CAN'T get the better of me disproving my points on hosts files' mulitiple nigh ubiquitous value to end users...
(Thanks for the +1 insightful upward moderation to whoever gave me it on my post)
APK
P.S.=> In fact? I'd almost WAGER per #5 above in this case, that it's Wladimir Palant (AdBlock creator) who wrote me by email, 1st, saying "hosts are a shitty solution" - well, when I confonted him in email reply to show me that "Almost ALL ADS BLOCKED" can do MORE than custom hosts? He refused to reply, & RAN like a scared rabbit...
...apk